Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (77 page)

He reached for the phone, punched in Brian Sullivan’s home number, then listened impatiently through four rings and the voice mail greeting. “Brian, meet me in my office first thing in the morning with the autopsy results on the rooming house victim. As of now, I want this officially upgraded to a homicide investigation.”

When he hung up, Sharon was looking up at him with a bemused smile. “I’ve done it now, haven’t I? I sense some long nights alone. Me, my son and our trusty new companion.”

He smiled, stretched over the dog on the floor and nibbled her ear teasingly. When the dog lifted her head sharply, he chuckled. “I have a feeling she won’t let me near you anyway.”

Ten

After the stifling week,
Friday dawned a glorious, cool, rain-washed blue. At nine o’clock, after a long battle through the rush hour, Green strode across the squad room towards his office, scanning the room for Sullivan. His mind was already in high gear, but he detected a curious hush in the air as detectives raised their heads to watch his progress. For a moment he wondered if the prime minister had been assassinated, or if Jules was on the warpath about some dismal bungling on his part. Jules had been furious at his skipping out on the conference Wednesday, and as punishment was threatening to assign him as coordinator of the inter-provincial anti-gang initiative. Given that coordination and team work were such strengths of his.

But the atmosphere was more one of titillation than of tension, and his question was soon answered by the desk clerk, who waved a pink message slip at him.

“Inspector Green, this woman has called you three times. Ashley Pollack, from Vancouver. She was pretty angry that I wouldn’t give her your home phone number.”

Green glanced around the squad room. All the officers were too new to the squad to know about his ex-wife, but to judge from their open grins, someone had tipped them off. Sullivan was nowhere to be seen, but the prehistoric Constable Blake was doing his stint downstairs at the main desk. Meddling
putz
.

Green snatched the number and disappeared into his office, careful to shut the door. As he dialled, he felt a surge of anxiety. He hadn’t spoken to Ashley in years. Her only communication had been through lawyers, and then only when there was bad news about Hannah, and she wanted him to solve it. Or rather, she wanted money to solve it. Three calls in the space of two hours signalled serious desperation, especially since it had been four a.m. in Vancouver when she’d placed her first call.

When her strident voice came on the line, the fifteen intervening years seemed to melt away, and a vivid image of teased blonde hair, sulky eyes and a querulous pout sprang to his mind. True to form, she wasted no time on niceties. “About time! Goddamn police force hasn’t changed a bit. Easier to get information out of the CIA.”

“I’ll give you my home number—”

“Do that! Like it or not, Hannah is your responsibility too.”

“What’s wrong, Ashley?”

“Hannah’s on her way to visit you.”

Green sat down with a thud. Intelligent thought deserted him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean she left last night. I think she caught the red-eye out of Vancouver, so she should be there any minute.”

Still no intelligent thought on the horizon. “You think? What the hell is going on!”

“I mean that’s where she said she was going when she stormed out the door. She seems to believe life will be better with you. That you’re her dad and it’s time she got to know you. I tried to tell her you’re a jerk, but she’s got to see that for herself.”

He ignored the classic ex-wife invective as he struggled to grasp the implications of the news. “But she doesn’t know where I live. Where’s she going to find me?”

“I told her to go straight to the police station. That’ll be a nice bit of irony. Hannah hates cops, thanks to a few encounters with your buddies on this side of the mountains— the usual drugs, under-age drinking, panhandling with her friends on Hastings. So she’s going to sashay into your station with a chip the size of a Douglas fir and boy, I’d love to be a fly on that wall.”

“Okay, okay.” Green’s mind raced. “What should I do?”

Ashley laughed, a high pitched giggle that had once reminded him of bells, but now sounded like a witch’s cackle. “If I had the answers, do you think she’d have gone off to see if the grass was greener with you? She’ll be looking in the goddamn desert.”

“Did she bring any clothes? Has she got any money?”

“Of course she does! You think I’d let her stomp out of here without a cent? I gave her two hundred dollars, plus she cleaned out Fred’s wallet before she took off, just to make a point.”

An intelligent thought finally drifted within grasp. He sensed the hurt beneath the anger and spoke more softly. “Okay, Ashley, I’ll try to help. Do you want me to persuade her to go back home?”

There was silence on the phone, and when she spoke, some of the anger had gone. “No, Mike. I think this is something she has to do. And...if you can keep her just for a bit, maybe till school starts again, who knows, maybe it will help her. God knows, shrinks at a hundred plus an hour haven’t.”

Keep her till school starts! Two months? His astonishment bulldozed the fragile beginnings of common sense he’d been rallying, so he signed off as quickly as he could get a word in. Once he’d hung up, he glanced at his watch. Her overnight flight from Vancouver had almost certainly arrived in Ottawa. In fact, Hannah should be walking through the front doors of the station any second.

Ignoring the questioning looks, he barrelled out of his office and downstairs to intercept her before Constable Blake had a chance to meet her. But there was no teenage girl in the lobby, and a quick check outside in the street revealed no sign of her either. Reluctantly, Green approached Blake to inquire if she’d turned up and to alert him to her imminent arrival. He tried to sound as if his daughter came to visit all the time, and if the desk officer was at all intrigued or titillated, he kept his face carefully deadpan.

“What does she look like?” was all he asked.

Green hesitated, for he had no idea. The latest picture Ashley had deigned to send him was of Hannah as a chubby preteen, complete with braces and braids. “I’ll get a full description of her clothes and current hair style from her mother if it matters, Blake, but I should think her name, Hannah Pollack, is sufficient. Just call me when she arrives.”

He returned upstairs to phone the airlines and learned that most of the overnight flights from Vancouver, even those that puddle hopped through every provincial capital along the way, had arrived at least an hour earlier. Even allowing for her catching the cheapest shuttle into town, she should have arrived. But there were still some avenues to explore before calling Ashley back and whipping up some serious concern.

Green spent the next few minutes on the phone checking flight manifests with the police at Airport Security and determined that Hannah had indeed boarded the midnight flight from Vancouver, which had arrived in Ottawa at eight in the morning. However, no one at the Ottawa airport was able to confirm whether she’d disembarked.

Reluctantly he phoned Ashley back with this update, and she surprised him with impatience rather than worry.

“Welcome to life with Hannah, Mike. This has been my life for almost ten years. She’s never where I expect her to be, never when she’s supposed to be, just like you. She pleases herself and never thinks what effect it might have on the rest of us. Or if she does, it’s just ‘oh well, too bad’.”

“But she doesn’t know Ottawa, and she has no friends or contacts here. Does she?”

“Doesn’t matter. She’ll find out where the kids hang out, and within hours she’ll be settled right in.”

“So you’re saying she won’t even call me?”

“Oh, she might. I’ve given up trying to predict what she’ll do. All I know is, the more buttons of ours she can push, the better. She knows you’re calling me, she knows we’re at each other’s throats—”

“We’re not.”

“But she hopes we are. She knows she’s got us both good and worried, and when she’s bored of the game, she’ll probably turn up. Either there or back here.”

“Good God, Ashley—”

“Don’t ‘Good God’ me, Mike! She’s your goddamn daughter with your goddamn genes, and I’ve done the best I can. No thanks to you!”

He calmed her down enough to obtain a description of Hannah and the clothes she was probably wearing. When he raised the topic of photos, scanners and emails, Ashley began to dither, but agreed to enlist her husband’s help. She warned that it might take a while, because she would have to locate him at work, and he was often on the road.

While he waited for the photo to arrive, Green ran the description by the baggage personnel at the airport, but to no avail. He swallowed his pride and checked with Blake again. Nothing. Sitting at his desk twirling his pen, he felt helpless. He couldn’t concentrate on the mundane details of his work, but he could do nothing more to find Hannah or to restore the equilibrium of his life that had suddenly spun off course. Hannah was here. She was visiting him.
Oy veh is mir.

When his phone rang, he snatched it up hopefully, but Barbara Devine’s voice snapped through the wires.

“Mike, what’s going on now? Jules tells me you’ve opened a Major Case file on Matthew Fraser’s death. Why?”

Matthew Fraser... Green collected his scattered thoughts and forced them to focus on the case. Last night, the Fraser investigation had been foremost in his thoughts. Now, when he could barely think, he had to find an intelligent way to tell Devine that she might have screwed up and missed the real villain in the case.

Devine must have interpreted his silence as stonewalling, because she announced that she was coming down. Green snatched up his notes on the Fraser file from the corner of his desk and headed out of his office, intercepting Devine just as she strode out of the elevator.

He gestured her back inside. “Let’s go grab a coffee. I need to pick your brains about the case again.”

“That’ll cost you a lot more than a cup of coffee,” she shot back. “At least a double scotch.”

Upstairs in the police cafeteria, he chose a table by the window in the deserted room, hoping the blue, sun-lit sky and the spectacular view of the museum would soothe some of the storm clouds gathered around her. Her make-up was impeccable, but one wing of her lacquered ebony hair was askew, and her eyes shot daggers over the rim of her cup. He waited until she’d had her first hit of caffeine before he broached his theory.

Predictably, her response was outrage, for no investigator likes to be wrong. “That’s utter nonsense, Mike. We considered doing those penile arousal tests before the trial. That is, the defence considered the tests, but the truth is they’re unreliable. So these results prove nothing.”

Already worried and frazzled, Green had neither time nor patience for bruised egos. He had a case to solve, and even more importantly, a daughter to find. He stirred his coffee slowly while he counted to five and mustered the limited tact at his disposal. He deliberately couched his theory in tentative terms, because until he had MacPhail’s ruling on the cause of death, his conclusions, however compelling, were pure conjecture. “I think Matthew Fraser may have been murdered. I think he was innocent of the abuse, but figured out who really did it. So let’s just play what if, okay? Let’s look at what other men were around in Rebecca’s life ten years ago.”

“I can’t believe you’re going to put innocent people through all this again.”

His tact began to desert him. “To flush out the guilty one? Yes.” He held up his thumb. “Number One on my list. Quinton Patterson.”

She stared him down across the table for a long, sullen moment. Finally she seemed to sag, and a flicker of worry pinched her brow. “You like to start small, don’t you?”

“He had daily access. And aren’t stepfathers and mother’s boyfriends the most frequent perpetrators of sexual abuse against little girls? In fact, don’t pedophiles often hook up with the mothers just to have access to their children?”

“Statistically, yes,” she admitted without enthusiasm. She blew across her coffee to cool it. “That doesn’t make all stepfathers bad guys.”

Green put his finger on an inconsistency that had nagged him all along. “But Patterson was a good-looking and promising young professional. He could have had the pick of the pack, yet he chose a vulnerable single mother saddled with two messed up children. Alcoholic on top of it, I understand.”

Devine shook her head sharply. “The drinking came afterwards, when not only her daughter’s but her son’s life went off the rails. When I first met Anne Patterson, she was one of those women who turned heads without even trying. Anyway, vulnerable would have appealed to Quinton Patterson, giving him a chance to play white knight. In case you haven’t noticed, he’s a take-charge kind of guy.”

Control freak is the term I’d use, Green thought, but she had a point. Quinton had come on the scene just as Anne was being hammered in court by her ex-husband, allowing Quinton to show off his dazzling legal skills.

Devine took a careful sip and wagged her finger. “I certainly wouldn’t put him ahead of her biological father. Becky spent every second weekend with Steve Whelan, and he was a piece of work. Selfish and manipulative, used the kids to get back at their mother. I could see him telling Becky she owed it to him.” She mimicked a wheedling male voice. “‘Make Daddy feel good, honey. Mommy’s so mean to Daddy, but Becky loves Daddy, doesn’t she? Daddy’s so lonely...that’s my special girl.’”

Green grimaced. “I get the picture. But Steve Whelan took a strange stance; he never believed Fraser was guilty, and he accused Quinton flat out of blaming Fraser to deflect the guilt from himself. Said Quinton planted the idea in Becky’s head. If Steve were guilty himself, why wouldn’t he lie low and hope the spotlight stayed firmly on Fraser? Why invite scrutiny?”

Devine rolled her eyes. “How many times have criminals thought themselves invincible, Green? And how many times has their own sick agenda—in this case his hatred of Patterson—won out over common sense?”